Peter Serracino Inglott: Perichoresis: A Meditation on the Icon of Our Lady of Damascus, Pubblikazzjoni Preca, 2010, 34pp.

Though books about icons abound without sating the reading (or collecting) public, writings about the Icon of Our Lady of Damascus, have reached a certain pint of resolution with the recent restoration work and the publication of up-to-date scholarship by several hands.

Nevertheless, when Peter Serracino Inglott thinks of adding his own reflections on that historical and artistic treasure or ours, it can never be a waste of time to stop and listen.

As usual with his shared thoughts, something can be learnt from them, and brains can be sent a-whirring, while our moods are prepared for intellectual mischief, seemingly outlandish proposals, parallelisms that make sense even when a little overstretched.

This fine booklet, which should be in the hands of all Melitensia lovers and all those who do not mind a few hours of adventurous roaming in local art history, goes back 20 years when he was asked as a non-specialist to present one work of art that he loved best. Even then, his thought went to Our Lady of Damascus.

It so happens that Fr Peter can also rope in his childhood inValletta, a few metres away from Enrico Mizzi’s house, and the Franciscan Ta’ Ġieżu church – in front of which he used to linger in order to hear the piano of Mrs Mizzi – and not so far from where the icon stood and beckoned from the penumbra of the Greek church.

With the very first words, Fr Peter establishes an ‘interface reaction’ in the icon, notes the ‘border crossing’ of the two faces of mother and child cheek-to-cheek rubbing, and lands a bull’s-eye on the tender hand of the Child Jesus which ‘is destined one day to be pierced with an iron nail and fixed on the horizontal plank’.

By a series of close readings of the painting, Fr Peter not only notes the hands and curled fingers of the Child Jesus, but concludes that his embrace is tantamount to a hold of possession on his Virgin Mother.

The Babe is seen at one and the same time as dynamically clambering up his mother’s body and also statically holding on to her, the two stances marking a moment of revelation like the anagoresis (or recognition) of Greek tragedy.

The painter has encapsulated in one second two moments of time, as it were, in something that recalls Teilhardian cosmic belonging. It is to be noted, says Fr Peter, that the body of Jesus seems to be part of Mary’s body lineaments, that is, it perfectly overlaps her left shoulder.

This close reading of Our Lady of Damascus that is venerated in the Greek rite Catholic Church inValletta, is well worth a careful perusal. It is clever, original, far-flung and even spiritually uplifting. It is one further argument in the thesis that Europe and Christianity are wedded to each other in a way that eschews divorce.

Fr Peter goes on to discuss the type of icon that is exemplified by Our Lady of Damascus. For most of the information about the icon, Fr Peter gives as his sources, among others, J. Azzopardi, MarioBuhagiar, G. Porsella Flores,A. Zammit Gabarretta.

Comparison is made between Our Lady of Vladimir (late 12th century) and our icon. The famous David Talbot Rice, in a short note to Papas Borgia in 1968 (reproduced in this booklet) opines that the first is even later than the second, ‘though the iconographic type, the Virgin of Tenderness, is the same’.

The vicissitudes of Maltese icon from its birth to the present day and recent restoration is a romance unfurled by Fr Peter in a number of closely-written pages. Its arrival in Malta is marked by another sprung surprise from Fr Peter. How was it possible for Caravaggio not to be impressed by the icon and not to be influenced by it? Was he?

This sets Fr Peter off on another fruitful tangent. Caravaggio was working a few metres away from the icon; and the famed Berenson has himself remarked on Caravaggio’s resort to Byzantine iconography and style on several occasions. By careful choice of examples, Fr Peter shows Caravaggio applying cheek-to-cheek tenderness in some of his paintings. The booklet is lavishly illustrated, for its size.

This study ends with a theological appraisal of the icon, a kind of Virgin Mother telescoping into Mother of Sorrows. The author finally recounts his first encounter with the icon as a little boy, and closes with a telling post-modern afterthought.